Tab stops in Word are horizontal markers that help keep your text aligned in a systematic and even manner. When you press the Tab key on the keyboard, it moves the cursor to a tab stop.
Tabs can be very useful when used creatively and carefully. Without tab stops, your document can look messy. Word provides tab stops to help you format paragraphs the way you want.
This means you can use tab stops independently within paragraphs in your document. When you want to change the formatting of the document, you can choose to delete individual tab stops or all of them at once. Here are two ways to delete tabs in Word:
1. How to delete individual tab stops in Word
Step 1: Display the tabs
Open the Word document you want to delete tabs in. Then click the Home tab on the ribbon menu.
Click the Show/Hide button in the Paragraph group to display all hidden characters. Now you will see the tabs appearing in your document.
Step 2: Display the ruler
Click the View tab on the ribbon menu. Then click the Ruler option in the Show group. Immediately, you will see the horizontal ruler with numbers starting from 1, 2, 3… displayed at the top of the document editing pane.
Note: The appearance of tab stops on the ruler is only relevant to the paragraph the mouse cursor is pointing to and how the text aligns with them.
Step 3: Delete the tab stops
To delete individual tab stops, simply click and drag a tab stop on the horizontal ruler and pull it out. The tab stop will immediately disappear from the ruler, and Word will realign the text with other tab stops.
Repeat the process to delete other tab stops in your Word document until you are satisfied with the result.
2. How to delete individual or all tab stops in Word
Step 1: Display the tabs
Open the Word document you want to delete tabs in. Then click the Home tab on the ribbon menu. Next, click the Show/Hidden button in the Paragraph group to display all hidden characters.
When activated, you will be able to see the existing tabs in your document. Now to delete tabs in Word, select all the text content in the document by pressing the Ctrl + A key combination.
Step 2: Open the Tab options
Next, click the small icon at the bottom-right corner of the Paragraph group to open the Paragraph settings dialog. In the displayed dialog, the Indents and Spacing tab is selected by default. Scroll down, then click the Tab… button at the bottom-left corner.
Step 3: Delete the tab stops
In the displayed Tabs dialog, Word will list all existing tab stops under the Tab stop position section. From the list below, select any tab stop you want to delete, then click the Clear button.
The selected tab stop will be immediately removed by Word. If you want to delete all tab stops at once in your Word document, simply click the Clear All button. Click OK to close all options and return to the document.
Conclusion
By deleting tabs in Word, you can completely remove the formatting of paragraphs in your document. Depending on your usage needs, you can easily remove individual tabs or all tabs at once using one of the methods above.